Google Assistant audio news clips will be better catered to you

Google has been working for the past year on revamping how Google Assistant delivers audio news clips.

Now, everyone gets the same audio clips when they ask for the news on a particular topic, but it will soon be catered to the listener.

Google is partnering with many different publications to make this new process work.

If you say, “Hey Google, play the news,” to your Google Assistant-powered device, you’ll get a collection of audio clips pertaining to news topics Assistant thinks you will be interested in.

However, other people around the world who use the same command to hear the same news about the same topics will predictably get the same audio response from Google Assistant. While this certainly works just fine, Google wants to make it even better.

Over the past year, via 9to5Google, Google has been working with an assortment of different news publications to help make Google Assistant better at delivering audio news clips specifically catered to the individual listening. The company is ready to start rolling out a test of these new features to a limited number of English-speaking Google Assistant users in the United States.

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Nestled among the big announcements at this year’s Google I/O was a potentially game changing Google News app. It replaces Google Play Newsstand (good riddance), and incorporates many of the features from your Google Feed into …

Imagine that you wake up in the morning and ask Assistant to tell you the news, which Assistant does. Later in the day, you ask Assistant for the news again. Under Google’s new vision, Assistant will eventually know that it already delivered you news information earlier in the day, and will give you updates on that news. In other words, Assistant will assume you already know the gist of the news topic and only deliver the pertinent updates on that topic.

Check out the YouTube video below which shows how audio news clips can be interactive and customizable:

Google has been developing this new technology with many prestige news sources, such as Associated Press, Hollywood Reporter, Universo Online, South China Morning Post, and 16 other publications. Users can already let Assistant know which publications they want to hear news from, but this new process will take things even further than that by delivering news and information the way one user specifically wants to hear it.

If you’re concerned about bias, Google has created an open specification for pretty much any publication to participate. As long as a news source publishes content in English, it can begin submitting content for inclusion in the new Assistant experience.

What do you think? Do you use Google Assistant for audio news delivery like this? Will this make you more or less inclined to do so? Let us know in the comments!